This paper introduces strategies for the electroacoustic community to relate to, and engage with, the visual music phenomenon. It addresses technological, historical, cultural and idiomatic intersections between the two art forms. From the personal viewpoint of a trained synaesthete of acousmatic origin, the boundaries between sonic and audiovisual compositional practices appear somewhat porous. The electroacoustic language is intrinsically visual, even within its acousmatic paradigm. Visible morphologies acquire a sonorous dimension as soon as we uproot them from their cinematographic habitat and plunge them into the cauldron of a new alchemy. Multi-disciplinary lines of enquiry are essential to elucidate the workings of complex multimediatic interactions such as those at play in visual music. Yet, a holistic view of the creative and technological pathways is equally significant so that artistic truths, and myths, can be (re)discovered amidst lines of code or loops of wire connecting our computer peripherals. Thus this article is written both with the language of an analyst and, perhaps more, with the expressions and idiosyncrasies of an academic composer. A few selected examples from the contemporary repertoire are discussed to exemplify a variety of approaches to visual music composition, including extracts from the work Patah (Garro 2010).

The concepts of consonance and dissonance broadly understood can provide structural models for creators of visual music. The application of words such as ‘harmony’ across both music and visual arts indicates potential correspondences not just between sensory elements such as pitch and colour but also with the manipulation of tension and resolution, anticipation and stability in visual music. Concepts of harmony have a long history in proportions of space, colour and motion as well as music that artists can now exploit with new technologies. I will offer examples from my own work as well as techniques from artists such as Oskar Fischinger and John Whitney.

Starting from the premiss that the central aesthetic feature of non-representational moving images (visual music) is their structuring of reception time, the function of the accompanying music in contributing to the total (combined) temporal structure of the resulting artwork is discussed. A taxonomy of the different roles that music can play in the production and reception of visual music consisting of three basic categories is presented and examples are given:

• • ‘Music translations’: certain parameters of the accompanying music are transcoded into certain visual parameters, the accompanying music thereby provides the temporal structure of the audiovisual artwork.

• • ‘Synthetic structures’: the music and the images provide different temporal informations with enough coincidences to be synthesised into a combined audiovisual strucuture by the viewer/listener.

• • ‘Mutual disturbance’: the aforementioned process fails to be realised due to a lack of sufficient points of synchronisation. As a result the accompanying music will disrupt the recognition of the temporal structure of the images and vice versa.

This article examines the evolution of music notational practices from avant-garde-era experiments in ‘mobility’ to the advent of the digital ‘screen score’. It considers the varied goals of the composers who initiated these developments and the dissonance between these goals and the practical possibilities actually afforded by the paper score.

The advent of graphical computing is charted along with the consequent expansion of possibilities afforded by screening the score from a platform that also provides the potential for performer coordination, sound synthesis and transformation. The performative, interactive and formal implications of these possibilities are considered.

The pioneering contributions of Daphne Oram to visual music, notably the construction of her unique synthesiser known as the Oramics Machine during the 1960s, have yet to be fully recognised. The development of this synthesiser, in terms of both the creative objectives that inspired its design and also the functional characteristics of the resulting technology, is all the more remarkable for being the product of highly individual endeavour, working entirely without the support and resources normally provided by an institution or a commercial manufacturer. Oram's background in both music and electronics was to prove invaluable in this regard, and her appointment as the founding director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, having previously lobbied within the organisation for such a facility for several years, provides testament to her standing in both regards. Her decision within a year of appointment to resign from this post and establish her own private studio specifically to develop Oramics is indicative of her determination and commitment to explore new horizons in the medium of electronic music, and this paper provides a perspective of her achievements, drawing on materials in the Oram archive that have hitherto not been studied.

This paper explores the context and technical and aesthetic considerations behind the author's generative and improvisational audiovisual work, Construction in Zhuangzi (2011), and in particular the approach of ‘audiovisualising’ the same source of data and its validation, and its possibilities as an artistic practice. First, the origins of integrated audiovisual art in the output of John Whitney are explored. Then, metaphors based on musical textures are used to describe different approaches to the audiovisual medium. Research into perception and auditory displays are next used to justify the simultaneous representation of the same data in both the audio and the video. The aesthetic potential of this practice is then corroborated using Michel Chion's theory of sound in cinema. In concluding, its possibilities for providing an appropriate form and aesthetic approach to the audiovisual material are discussed.

The field of electroacoustic music has witnessed years of extensive exploration of aural spatial perception and an abundance of spatialisation techniques. Today the growing ubiquity of visual 3D technologies gives artists a similar opportunity in the realm of visual music. With the use of stereoscopic video we now have the ability to compose individual depth cues independently. The process of continuous change of the perceived depth of the audiovisual space over time is being referred to as depth modulation, and can only be fully appreciated through motion.

What can be achieved through the separation and manipulation of visual and sonic spatial cues? What can we learn about the way we perceive space if the basic components building our understanding of the surrounding environment are artificially split and re-arranged?

Visual music appears to be a perfect field for such experimentation. Strata of visual and aural depth cues can be used to create audiovisual counterpoints in three-dimensional spaces. The choice of abstract imagery and the lack of obvious narrative storylines allow us to focus our perception on the evolution of the immersive audiovisual space itself. A new language of an immersive audiovisual medium should emerge as a delicate, ever-changing balance between all previously separated and altered components.

Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

This article is based on my creative practice as an electroacoustic1 composer who has developed a practice of audiovisual composition broadly sited within the field of visual music.

A brief contextual survey sites my work by first presenting a personal definition of visual music and of a set of conceptual approaches to work in this field. My practice is framed as an attempt to apply ideas and principles taken from musique concrète in an audiovisual domain. I discuss in particular the idea of reduced listening and propose a visual equivalent, visual suspension.

I discuss the problems around reduced listening when applied to concrète ‘real-world’ sounds, and propose that two audio archetypes, silence (or tending-to-silence) and noise (or tending-to-noise), exhibit unique physical and phenomenological properties which sidestep these issues. Observing a similar set of problems around visual suspension, I propose visual counterparts to silence and noise – by relating both to the idea of self-similarity, both temporal and spatial – which exhibit similar properties. In my own work I have found these audiovisual territories to be especially fertile, and to open up avenues for new kinds of sound–image relationships with great creative potential.

The word ‘acousmatic’ has a strange and complicated history. Recent Schaefferian accounts have replicated François Bayle's sketch of the ‘histoire du mot’ from his Musique acousmatique – in particular, the assumed synonymy between ‘acousmatique’ and ‘acousmate’. However, this synonymy is mistaken. The word ‘acousmate’ was first coined in an article from 1730 to describe a strange noise heard one evening in the small French village of Ansacq. A discussion of the article follows, which shows how the word is unrelated to the Pythagorean acousmatics, and how its author understood his ‘acousmate’ in the context of contemporary natural science. Additionally, a sketch of the term's changing signification in three discourses – scientific, psychological and literary – is presented. The goal of this article is to articulate a set of problems concerning the historiography of acousmatic listening in the Schaefferian tradition. These problems include: 1) the need to authorise a practice of musique acousmatique, which has limited historical investigation to moments where the word ‘acousmate’ or ‘acousmatique’ appear in the archive; 2) a mistaken assumption that ‘acousmate’ and ‘acousmatique’ are synonymous, which has forced together historical moments that are not in fact affiliated; 3) an adherence to this affiliation, which has foreclosed the opportunity to consider acousmatic listening as a set of culturally and historically specific practices concerning the relationship of seeing and hearing.